Disposing of old metallographic mounts

[MTUMetEng99]

Just wondering how others dispose of old metallographic mounts?
Where I work, we normally just toss them in the trash, but considering the volume of work we have, it seems like an awful lot of metal to be just tossing in a landfill.
Can we toss them in with our regular metal scrap? I am somewhat inclined to think that the scrap dealers wouldn't want all that phenolic and acrylic "contamination", but maybe it's not an issue?
Thanks in advance.

 

[dbooker630]

I dispose of mounts with the rest of the laboratory scrap metal. This also includes swarf from a wet cutoff and dry chips from a band saw. This has been approved by our environmental person as well as our scrap source. In our case the $/ton rebate is reduced by the non-metals content. I would consult with an environmental professional as well as your scrap metal vendor. You may have to get an analysis profile performed if you continue to dispose in a landfill because of the heavy metals present.

 

[swall]

We got yelled at by a scrap dealer because we threw our mounts into the steel scrap waste bin in the lab. We then "archived" our mounts off site; not sure how the disposal was handled.

 

[unclesyd]

We got rid of about 2000 mounts from our archives and the archive of a local lab by using our Pyrolysis furnace to remove the plastic, so we ended up with a mixed bag of scrap which we dribbled into the steel scrap bin.

On about 100 of the mounts where we still had the technical reports with all the raw data we made a catalogue of these mounts and gave this to a professor of metallurgy. These mounts covered the whole gambit of metallurgy and failures of same. I just wish I had taken the time to verify the man hours of analytical work involved to generate these mounts.

 

[Maui]

We would always throw them in the scrap buckets along with machining chips, cut-offs, and other scrap for remelting. Since we melted our own steel, we did not have any run-ins with scrap dealers about the plastic from the mounts. It did not, as far as I know, ever create an issue for us regarding chemical composition of subsequent heats. And the volume percent was so small that I can't imagine how it ever could.

Swall, did your scrap dealer have some problems with this before with one of his customers?

Maui

http://www.EngineeringMetallurgy.com

 

[Metalhead97]

Nobody throws away mounts where I work since we deal with precious metals. If anything the metal gets broken-out and sent to refining. In fact, we have mounts that are over 15 years old!

Metalhead

 

[Guest102023]

The met supply folks will tell you that the plastics are safe for landfill as ong as they have been used; i.e., not in separate containers like epoxy.

Burning by a metal recycler is not environmentally responsible.

 

[blacksmith37]

I have seen them made into cuff-links; but I think the potential market is limited.